Navigating a story can feel like the children’s game hide-and-seek. Within stories, whether intentional or not, there are elements hidden to the audience – and sometimes even to the author – that hold glimmers of knowledge and insights. The process of finding this hidden knowledge and insight – the meaning – within a story mirrors hide-and-seek because it involves following your intuition and being attentive to clues, all the while, experiencing suspense and discovery.
In life, finding the meaning within a story, even our own, is additionally complex because it is deeply connected to a broader collective narrative. Our individual tales contribute to and are shaped by this larger network of meaning, creating what is called a moral ecology – a social web of relationships, knowledge, and institutions that help people develop character and find deeper meaning in life. Just as healthy ecosystems in nature support diverse life, these networks shape how we understand right and wrong and encourage us to engage shared values that make our lives richer and more purposeful.
Today, as our stories are increasingly woven into vast networks of information by technology, we face heightened levels of complexity that threaten the health of our moral ecologies. Storytelling is now a communal act where every output of information feeds a node in a larger system. These networks amplify our narratives, revealing their power to inspire connection and provoke positive change – but also to distort, isolate, and divide. Understanding this interplay is vital, as these interconnected stories give shape to our individual and collective moral ecologies.
The REDI Lab, with its mission to help students and teachers uncover their “why” as a source of potential and agency, was designed to explore the complexity of our personal stories as a part of a learning experience. The REDI Lab approaches this complexity using human-centered design processes as a way to uncover hidden insights within their own stories while recognizing how those narratives contribute to broader social narratives. By operating with the understanding that a story is a vehicle to organize learning and inspire individual and collective action, the Lab fosters insight into why we do what we do and what more is possible in our lives.
This work has important implications for how we address the challenges of living in a postnormal era. By treating stories as living, evolving learning networks, people can develop the cognitive capacity to better know the world and their potential within it. Using design thinking, the REDI Lab works to cultivate a culture where seeking what may be hidden in our stories is central to learning. This process of inquiry facilitates the sonder we may need to generate in our storytelling to build a better collective narrative and moral ecology. The question is are we ready or not.
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Postnormal Era defined by Ziauddin Sardar
“The in between period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have not yet emerged, and nothing really makes sense. …this period of transition which is characterised by three c’s: complexity, chaos and contradictions. The most important ingredients for coping with postnormal times are imagination and creativity. Imagination is the main tool, indeed I would suggest the only tool, which takes us from simple reasoned analysis to higher synthesis.”
Sonder defined by John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
“The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own – populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness – an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.”
Written by Paul Kim – REDI Lab Co-Founder and Faculty